Sandboxes Explained: How They’re Already Protecting You and How to Sandbox Any Program

http://www.howtogeek.com/169139/sandboxes-explained-how-theyre-already-protecting-you-and-how-to-sandbox-any-program/

Sandboxing is an important security technique that isolates programs, preventing malicious or malfunctioning programs from damaging or snooping on the rest of your computer. The software you use is already sandboxing much of the code you run every day.

You can also create sandboxes of your own to test or analyze software in a protected environment where it won’t be able to do any damage to the rest of your system.

Sandboxing isn’t something the average user needs to worry about.

Desktop programs aren’t generally sandboxed by default. Sure, there’s UAC — but as we mentioned above, that’s very minimal sandboxing. If you want to test out a program and run it without it being able to interfere with the rest of your system, you can run any program in a sandbox.

Virtual Machines: A virtual machine program like VirtualBox or VMware creates virtual hardware devices that it uses to run an operating system.

Sandboxie: Sandboxie is a Windows program that creates sandboxes for Windows applications. It creates isolated virtual environments for programs, preventing them from making permanent changes to your computer. This can be useful for testing software.